


Uncanny Valley

by SatiricalDraperies



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: BAMF Mal Cobb, Female Friendship, Gen, Inception Big Bang Challenge, Mal Cobb-centric, Pre-Canon, and by 'we' I mean Mal, in which we invent both totems and inception itself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 16:21:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20048971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SatiricalDraperies/pseuds/SatiricalDraperies
Summary: Mal looks to her right and Pip’s still laying there unconscious, her mouth slightly open and her fingers curled loosely.She looks like a painting,Mal thinks.One of those hazy oil paintings of women holding flowers or a letter before they fall asleep, wistfully dreaming of a future full of soft petals and kind words.It scares her.It scares her so fucking much, but she has to do something.





	Uncanny Valley

**Author's Note:**

> there's [art](https://swimmingrat.tumblr.com/post/186683345152/my-second-contribution-to-the-inception-big-bang) for this by the incredibly talented @swimmingrat on tumblr! go show them some love!

They’re pushing in on her, the projections, they’re everywhere, and even after dreaming up heels and platforms and fucking _stilts_ she still can’t see Pip anywhere. She can’t hear her yelling at all (can Pip hear her yelling?) over the noise of them, all heavy breathing and omniscient rhythmic synchronized heartbeats and she supposes it isn’t a sound, not really, but there’s just so much _flesh_ surrounding her on all sides, like that time she went to a mosh pit and lost all sense of where she ended and the world began. This feels just like that—_eerily_ like that—and she wonders how she’s able to dream up something so vehemently real. This isn’t real, right? There’s just so much _life_ around her, and so naturally all she can think about is death.

Death.

And then the linoleum floor is cold as hell against her bare feet and it’s pushing her up into this world while the sticky summer air is holding her down, pressing on her until she remembers her shape, draped in her sweaty linen shirt and pierced by the needle in her arm. It’s sucking her life force (in or out?) and she realizes she doesn’t know which way life is flowing until the needle finally sucks out her confusion and isn’t she supposed to be waking up just about now?

* * *

“Damn Pip,” she says with a wince, sitting up to grab her oversized tweed blazer. “That’s some subconscious you’ve got on you. Real charming.”

No reply.

“Pip?”

Mal looks to her right and Pip’s still laying there unconscious, her mouth slightly open and her fingers curled loosely. _She looks like a painting,_ Mal thinks. _One of those hazy oil paintings of women holding flowers or a letter before they fall asleep, wistfully dreaming of a future full of soft petals and kind words._

It scares her. 

It scares her so fucking much, but she has to do something.

* * *

“Mal! Thank goodness you’re here!” Pip twirls around, her arms outstretched and her eyes full of sunlight. “Isn’t this beautiful?”

“It’s a dream,” Mal says matter of factly. It is beautiful—too beautiful—now that the projections are gone and she can breathe again, but it’s still a dream. A dream could never be worth more than reality. 

“I wish my dreams were this lovely,” Pip muses, still ogling the softly nostalgic city around her. “I’d never wake up.”

“Really?” Mal asks. What if Pip doesn’t want to wake up? Does she have the moral responsibility to wake Pip up? Or is it more important for Pip to be happy, even if it’s false? Well, better for Pip to make that decision herself. If Mal can find a way to let her know that she’s dreaming… 

And then she has an idea, a horrible,_ horrible_ idea. It’s untested and probably dangerous. Groundbreaking in the way that earthquakes are. 

“Hey,” she says, quirking her mouth up. “Speaking of dreaming. I’ve got this theory about consciousness. How we know when we’re dreaming.” She pauses, letting the seed take root. “What would happen if we didn’t.”

And this is the real test, isn’t it, to see if Pip will take the bait and let Mal do something, anything. She doesn’t know what she’ll do. She doesn’t know what she can do. 

“Fine, let’s go test this theory of yours,” Pip says, rolling her eyes, but she’s smiling as Mal leads her around the corner to their garage. 

_Will Pip notice that the geography is off? Will she question why none of the landmarks look familiar? Will she look too closely at the stained concrete floor or wonder what’s missing from the distinctive cocktail of smoke and sex that’s constantly floating in from upstairs?_

Mal’s overthinking again. She needs to calm down, let Pip’s mind fill in the details. And besides, the goal is for Pip to realize she’s dreaming, right? What does it matter if she notices something’s off?

And that’s when Mal _gets_ it.

They lie down in the canvas beach chairs and Mal _dreams_ that the colors are brighter and the metal less rusted. The fabric under her legs is less frayed and loses its characteristic bumbs and nonconformities. She looks up and the ceiling texture swirls a little, but not much. Just a little.

The world is different, and Mal smiles. Just a little.

She’s still smiling as Pip pulls out the PASIV and opens it up, too caught up looking up at her handiwork that she doesn’t notice the terror on Pip’s face until Pip's lungs catch up with her petrified mind and she finally is forced to let out the small gasp of air she sucked in out of a vestigial, primal fear. 

“What is it?” Mal asks, keeping her tone even and her voice sweet as honey, though it’s trembling—just a little.

“That’s so… funny,” Pip ponders, her words careful and deliberate. They traipse off her tongue, falling one by one like fish into the sea, where they splash like Olympic divers with unobtrusive impacts that stand out in their alienation. “Does the PASIV look—off—to you?”

Mal leans over and looks into the leather briefcase and its homemade metal contents, carefully soldered together and held in place with only the finest dollar store electrical tape. One of these days she’ll get around to redoing it, but for now it’s both functional and inconspicuous out of necessity. She longs for the day when dreamsharing makes its way into the mainstream and the PASIV becomes its symbol, universally recognized—and more importantly, universally accepted.

But for now the steampunk device sits in its worn leather case, and Mal doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She says so, but then she starts to look more closely. The familiar circuitry is bent in unfamiliar ways. It twists until Mal doesn’t know which direction she’s looking in, only that the PASIV is reminiscent of a compass and it’s pointing directly at the faded label _DREAMING_.

“No,” she says again, forging her face into pleasantry when she can’t make herself look unshakable any other way. “Looks normal enough to me.”

* * *

The ceiling is still swirling overhead when she wakes up into the next dream. _Dream within a dream,_ she muses. _Huh._

Pip starts to stir next to her and Mal panics. It’s not like she thought through any part of this plan. It’s not like she really had a plan. 

_Dream within a dream within a dream. Is it possible?_

She doesn’t stop to think—this is a dream, after all, where logic plays second fiddle to instinct—and so her fingers fly over the dials and she watches as another dose of green sedative travels down the line into Pip’s arm.

A second later, she passes out as well.

* * *

“Where _are_ we?” Pip asks, her titian eyes and lavender mouth open wide in three perfect circles. She walks to the wall of windows and looks down at the world, all mint and mauve and blushing as pink as her cheeks.

“It looks like a zeppelin,” Mal says, a bit of reproach in her voice.

“Well of course we’re in a _zeppelin_!” Pip giggles. “I _meant_, what do you think that city is?”

Mal follows her finger (the tip is painted a shocking lemon yellow) to the visibly curved horizon where several hazy ochre buildings are poking out from a fluffy layer of fog.

“It’s a dream, Pip,” she says at first, then remembers that Pip probably wasn’t supposed to know that.

“Ad-reem!” Pip exclaims. She claps her hands together in delight. “I’ve heard it’s lovely this time of year! Oh, let’s go _there_, Mal!”

She looks at Mal with such endearment in her eyes that Mal can’t help (does she give in or is this part of her plan?) but comply immediately.

“Of course,” she says, and smiles. “Here. I think you’ll need this to navigate.”

And so she reaches into _nothing_ and extracts a dream, winding the wisps of it around her finger until she is holding the only thing devoid of color in this worldscape. It’s black and white and harsh compared to the preposterously organic architecture; the shapes are all angles and strictly straight lines excepting the circular dial, and yet even that has a severe aspect to it as the steeply triangular needle points to _DREAMING_. Pip takes it and her hand seems to solidify around the device, her edges drawn together and fully rendered.

_Funny_, Mal thinks. The compass is quite possibly the most feigned aspect of this dream, and yet it is the one thing that isn’t too marvelous to be real.

It’s not real though. Mal has to remind herself of that. The compass is not real. Even if it helps Pip to realize what’s real, the compass itself is not.

Pip holds the compass in front of her, not appearing to notice anything off about the inscription.

“To Ad-reem!” she declares, and the zeppelin begins to execute a nose dive towards the rippling golden-green fields.

* * *

They arrive on the second level, coming up or down, depending on your perspective—or your metaphor. This time, they’re seated in a packed train cabin. Mal can hear the whistle of the wind and the metallic clanking of the pistons pumping. She can’t tell if the smoke outside is fog or steam from the engine or a combination of both. Either way, she can’t see a thing through the dusty brown haze.

“So,” Pip is saying, her clothes tinted sepia and her words muffled by radio static. “You said you had a way to distinguish dreams from reality?”

“An idea,” Mal says, still looking out the window. If she squints she can make out rough patterns of trees and hills and houses, but she might just be imagining it. The image is grainy and underdeveloped. 

“I can work with ideas.”

“Try this one on for size. What if—” and then she starts over. “You know how straws look broken and disjointed when you put them in a glass of water? What if we could do that, but with dreams?”

“I’m listening,” Pip says, her brows quirking as her face becomes more angular.

“You have an object in reality—a toy or tool, something small and distinctive—and you take it with you into dreams. And it—” she’s stuttering over her thoughts. “It works differently there. Something’s wrong. Nothing drastic. Just enough to tip you off that you’re—”

“Uncanny valley,” Pip says.

“Uncanny—? What?” It feels like she knows the phrase, like she _should_ know what Pip’s talking about, but something about it escapes her, like when you’re trying to recount a dream the next morning.

“Our brains hate it. When something is so close to reality but we know it’s fake,” she shakes her head. “Gives me the creeps just thinking about it.”

Uncanny valley. It’s a pastel zeppelin flying over a gossamer city. It’s a copper train chugging along through a terra-cotta cloud. It’s a drug without the come-down, a carpet without the stains, a world without the flaws. It’s a compass that shows the way home. It’s—

“A totem of reality,” she says, and then the train runs off its tracks.

* * *

Pip looks towards the PASIV, then looks back to the compass in her hand. Mal can just barely see the word _DREAMING_ flickering in and out like a mirage.

“It’s right, isn’t it?” Pip doesn’t look up, just keeps staring, fixated.

“Do you trust it to be right?” Mal asks, her words sounding more and more French as she awaits Pip’s response.

“I have this compass,” Pip says. “It was my grandmother’s. She was a pilot. She gave it to me when she passed. Said I’d always be able to find my way home, as long as I knew where I was. But that was the one thing it couldn’t do. It couldn’t tell me where I was. I had to know that for myself. Now, though,” she pauses, looks directly up at Mal. “I know where we are.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Pip looks out the garage window; the glass is improbably clear and unwarped for the age of the building. Outside, the sky is just beginning to fade into a rainbow of soft sunset colors. The skyscrapers slowly light up like jars full of fireflies. Mal wouldn’t blame Pip if she wanted to stay here, if she wanted to melt down the compass and reforge it into a dream she’d never wake up from. Is there any dream so good that Mal could live in it for an eternity?

She thinks for a half second, then decides it doesn’t matter. Right now, that’s Pip’s question, and she’s the only one who can answer it.

An orange glow slices through the perfect window, illuminating a solitary harshly defined rectangle on the concrete floor before the glow expands to fill the whole room. They see it, then they hear it, then they feel it: the force of the explosion as the dream erupts into one dazzling display of marmalade sparklers.

* * *

The world doesn’t seem as bright, but that’s okay. This time, Pip’s already awake when Mal looks over. She’s turning something over in her hand. Mal leans over to get a closer look.

“It never said north,” Pip says to no one in particular. “Her compass had no word there. I don’t know if it faded, or if there was a factory defect, but by the time she gave it to me there was nothing there.”

“What do you mean?” 

“When you dreamed it—”

“When _I_ dreamed it? You were the one who dreamed it into the PASIV?”

“What PASIV? When was there a PASIV in our dream?”

“In the city where you—”

“We were on a train—”

“We were on a zeppelin—”

“We were right here—”

And then they both stop talking for a little while, Pip still fingering the compass. She looks at it with more than a hint of _je ne sais quoi_ in her face. But she’s returned to reality, unfiltered as it might be. Mal smiles, suddenly confident in the future.

_A totem of reality._ Sounds promising.


End file.
